


In Negotiation

by RurouniHime



Series: The Arrangement series [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aging, Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Returning Home, Sexual Content, Timestamp, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 16:10:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3735205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“So,” Harry found himself saying. And it was sudden. Hell, it was half-three in the morning. “Are we married then?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One year

**Author's Note:**

> Three timestamps post-Arrangement.

“So,” Harry found himself saying. And it _was_ sudden. Hell, it was half-three in the morning. “Are we married then?”

Draco turned his head slowly to look at him. The silence held weight. Harry raised his eyebrows.

“For all intents and purposes?”

A shocking look passed over Draco’s face, as if more than one question were being answered. He looked down at his paper and then very deliberately set it beside him on the bed. He hitched the covers up between them and crawled to Harry’s side. Not a great distance, but Harry felt every inch.

Draco’s hand came to rest atop Harry’s. He bent forward and touched his lips to Harry’s forehead. “Harry, I’m thirty-two years old. I have no intention of ever being without you.”

Harry nudged a lock of hair away from Draco’s temple. “That’s rather blunt.”

“So was the question.” Draco still looked a bit startled. “I own a home with you. Granted, at the moment it’s across a great bloody ocean, but the fact stands. You’re underneath every thought I have. I’ve been happier these past few years than I ever was. To be ‘rather blunt,’ you are the only person I ever want fucking me, and the only one I want to fuck.” He paused. “I only have to think about you and I feel you. If that’s being married, then yes. I ‘married’ you a long time ago.”

Harry let it float over him. It felt good. Draco’s eyes were on him still, and Harry had the suspicion that the man would watch him for hours until he finally decided to give some sort of response.

The idea had heavy things attached to it: family, forever… The lines and contours of Draco’s face when he was fifty, sixty, seventy. Older. Harry looked at Draco, to study that still-young face: the tilt of the jaw he’d traced a million times, the slant of those eyes and their thunderhead colour, the shape of that mouth, a full bottom lip and a sharp upper one, and the fine tendons running down his throat. His arms. Gods, Draco had beautiful hands, long-fingered, promising dedicated wrinkles as they aged. He suspected Draco would complain about them as soon as he could, but as long as he let Harry touch them whenever he wanted, Harry would take any amount of griping.

It was that image, of touching Draco’s hands thirty years from today, that brought the response at last. “Have you ever thought about making it official?”

Draco’s eyes flicked once. He snorted and picked up his paper again. “I’m not one for ceremony. At least, not that ceremony.”

Harry smirked. “I was just about to say.”

“Shut it.” But Draco’s mouth had twisted up at the corners. Harry leaned in and kissed it quickly. 

“And what if I am one for ceremonies?”

Draco’s mouth puckered further. He nodded very slightly as his gaze roved down the newspaper. “Then I’d say we have potential for a major disagreement.”

Harry grinned. “Another one.”

“You know I love you,” Draco said quickly, folding the paper and facing Harry. The grace of it still made Harry a bit shivery.

He nodded. “And I know I don’t need a ring to remind me.”

Draco studied him, but did not nod back. Abruptly he picked up his paper again. “I might want to see it.”

“What?”

“A ring. There.” He tapped Harry’s left ring finger without looking. “I might like the look.”

“Right.” Harry leaned back. “You just want to claim me without an extravagant dowry. Well, no chance. My father will come after you with a shotgun,” he finished in a falsetto.

“Hmm, well, you’ll let me know when I’ve knocked you up then, yeah?” Draco drawled. “So I can leave town.”

Harry let the laughter out, relishing the fact that Draco wasn’t even attempting to keep a straight face anymore. “Merlin, there’s a nice image. See if I ever let you near me again.”

Draco tossed his paper away for good with an elegant flick of his wrist. “Oh, you will,” he muttered, turning and bracing himself over Harry, an arm either side of his head. “We’ve got work to do.”

Harry snorted. “Going to take a damn long time to knock me up, Malfoy.”

“I’ve got a week’s holiday coming up,” Draco murmured before pressing his lips to Harry’s. 

~tbc~


	2. Three years

During her tenure, Pansy had made the guest room hers and left the master suite as she’d found it. Their first night back in England, they didn’t bother with any lights except the lamp in their room. The only housekeeping they did was changing out the musty sheets for fresh ones. 

Harry pulled Draco flush against him, chest to chest, and buried his face in his neck. He rolled Draco’s hips steadily, quickly, forward and back until the man’s gasps became ragged. The sound reached deep inside Harry, so well-loved, and pulled the last reservations free of their holdings, leaving him nothing but what he wanted most, coupled with a peculiar sense of abandon.

It seemed an age ago that he’d first said the words, almost a joke. After all that had happened in America, it could never be that anymore. That night, it had been a different person speaking. Tonight, Harry felt old, tired, and finally safe in a way he hadn’t been in months. He cradled Draco’s head, laced fingers through his sweaty hair, and turned his mouth until he felt the curve of Draco’s ear beneath his lips.

“Merlin, Draco, _please_ marry me. Please.”

Draco shuddered. One hand found Harry’s wrist and clenched around it just hard enough to make Harry pause. Draco pulled back until Harry could see the flush of his face.

“Why do you want this so badly?” he managed, curiosity turning his words soft. His grey eyes were dilated, but unwavering.

Harry took Draco’s face in both hands. “Because I want to look at you and think, ‘Founders, that man is my _husband.’”_

Draco’s eyes widened. Harry wondered what his statement had sounded like. Draco bent forward and kissed Harry’s forehead. His lips lingered and Harry felt their tremble. “Yeah,” he breathed, “yes, I’ll marry you.”

“Will you?” Harry whispered. Draco let out a soft breath. Harry felt the clutch of his body around him.

“Officially and all.” Draco found Harry’s mouth halfway through the words, touching his lower lip with his tongue. Harry caught the kiss, forgot to breathe and was glad of it. Draco pulled back, inhaling sharply, and renewed his grip on Harry’s shoulders. His eyes tracked Harry’s face for a lengthy moment. “I like you better when you’re happy.”

“Thank you.” Harry spoke carefully, looking Draco right in the eye. At last, Draco’s lip twitched upward.

“You’re welcome. Now please, make me come, Potter, while it’s still sordid and scandalous.”

Harry gathered him closer, drawing Draco up until he was on his knees on the mattress—their mattress, gods, it was good to be home—and pushed him back onto the bed. Draco hit the sheets with a soft huff, staring at Harry through heavy-lidded eyes. Harry tugged his hips as tightly to himself as he could, and thrust hard. Draco’s head dropped back, baring pale throat. He let one arm fall above his head, clutching the rumpled sheets. Harry sucked at the curve of Draco’s collarbone, listening to the increasingly frantic sounds coming from his lover. Draco’s fingers dug into Harry’s shoulder, then clenched into a trembling fist against his back. Harry reached up above Draco’s head and entangled his fingers with their pale counterparts, easing them from their grip on the sheets. Draco grabbed his hand hard in response, said his name once, _Harry._ His eyes shut, his body shuddered, and he came with several sharp gasps. Draco’s climax pulled at Harry, further and further, legs tightening around Harry’s lower back, the hand on his shoulder now flat and damp. Draco continued to pant, tiny hushes in Harry’s ear, and then Harry forgot what he was hearing and came, squeezing Draco’s fingers and breathing hard into the sweaty skin of his lover’s throat. 

Fiancé’s throat.

“Oh god,” he whispered. Draco swept his face upward with a touch and kissed the words from his mouth. “Thank you. Thank you for being with me. For _staying_ with me.”

“Shh. Shhh,” was all Draco seemed able to say.

But Harry was having none of it. He kissed Draco long and deep, then clutched his slack body as close as he could and whispered the word fiancé out loud. Draco managed a chuckle.

“Quiet. Bloody well scare someone.”

Harry kissed his cheek and didn’t answer, just catching his breath and savouring Draco’s smell.

~tbc~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeeeeees, there are significant events that occurred during their stay in the US. Maybe I'll get to them one day. Just know that Harry didn't take the years there as well as he would have liked.


	3. Five years

There was silver in Draco’s hair, just there where his fringe tucked back behind his ear. Harry wondered if Draco had noticed. He certainly knew about the strands near the nape of his neck; Harry heard about them colourfully at least once a week. 

He thought aging suited Draco.

Draco talked about charming his hair, offhand comments thrown about as he wrestled cantankerous old furniture into place in their sitting room— 

(“And _he_ said ‘you’re looking so very much like your father,’ the arse,” as the sofa planted its feet and muscled for control across the hardwood floor. “As though it were a bloody compliment!”)

—or coaxed vintage kitchenware into preparing ‘just one more meal for us before you give up and die, you godsforsaken piece of crockery.’

“I’m going to blast it off,” Draco raged while levitating both casserole dish and the mess that had just exploded from it away from their pristine worktop. 

“What, the casserole dish?”

“The grey! Salazar, Potter, pay attention.” Draco deposited their former dinner in the rubbish bin and ran his hand fitfully through said hair. “Permanent toning spell, right at the roots.”

It was the way his thumb rubbed wistfully over the graying strands even while he set the dish to scrubbing itself that got Harry, sent him forward into the kitchen, backing Draco up to the counter. Hitching him onto it, sliding neatly into the vee of his thighs, dipping both hands down the back of Draco’s waistband until he could pull him forward. Until their bodies could meet.

A “Well, what’s this all about?” whispered between their mouths before Draco surrendered to the kiss, then to the harsh gasps, the way they couldn’t kiss at all before long, and fucking Draco atop their kitchen worktop, belts clinking, pants half removed, sweat and heat and the clatter of falling utensils only the spice to the delicious provocation of Draco’s silvering temples. Harry ran his own hands through the hairs there, twisted them gently around his fingers, nosed the deepening laugh lines and imagined the wizened curl of a well-known smirk. Kissed Draco’s temple later, while its owner clung and huffed for breath against his shoulder.

“One would think you were getting off on this bedamned affront to nature,” Draco said, his fingers settling over Harry’s alongside his head.

“So what if I am?” Harry mumbled.

“I’d have to seriously reconsider my life choices. Obviously.”

“How about you just reconsider charming it?”

A pause. “Could do that.”

“Should do that.”

“You know, I remember in sickness and in health, richer, poorer, etcetera, whatever. Not once did I agree to greyer.”

“Call it an amendment,” Harry murmured. Draco took his face in hand and kissed him properly.

“So now we amend wedding vows?”

“Could look into it.” Harry drew the kiss out.

“Hm. Why don’t you draft something, and I’ll look it over.”

“You could make edits.”

“I could.” Draco nosed along Harry’s cheek.

“We could discuss wording. Hammer out…” He lipped at Draco’s mouth and Draco chased it. “A suitable arrangement.” Again. “For everyone.”

“Mm hm.” Draco nodded, and dragged him back in.

~fin~


End file.
